Ruth’s World

Ruth Madoff alone in her Manhattan duplex penthouse on June 26, the day she struck a deal with prosecutors to keep $2.5 million. Six days later, on July 2, six U.S. marshals arrived to take possession of the apartment and usher Ruth out. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes.

Ruth Madoff professed her contrition—and her innocence—soon after her husband’s outraged victims learned she had cut a deal with prosecutors that left her with $2.5 million. Was this a fresh example of Bernie Madoff pulling the strings, even from behind bars? And how could she not have known about his Ponzi scheme? Talking to the Madoffs’ former close friends, the author probes the true nature of their 49-year marriage, from Ruth’s deep involvement in the business to the demons underneath her perfect-wife façade, to the bizarre life she’s led since Bernie was arrested.

On June 29, Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and for the first time since his arrest, seven months earlier, his wife, Ruth, issued a statement. “I am breaking my silence now, because my reluctance to speak has been interpreted as indifference or lack of sympathy for the victims of my husband Bernie’s crime, which is exactly the opposite of the truth,” it began. That day, nine of Bernie Madoff’s victims read statements of their own at his sentencing in court, telling horror stories of the overnight devastation he had brought on them, calling him the epitome of evil, and making references to the Devil, who chews up traitors in Dante’s Inferno: “May Satan grow a fourth mouth where Bernard L. Madoff deserves to spend the rest of eternity.” To compound the victims’ outrage, the news was just out that Ruth Madoff, who had been her husband’s closest companion and sometime bookkeeper through their 49 years of marriage, had cut a deal with prosecutors to keep $2.5 million in exchange for surrendering a potential claim to $80 million in assets, including her homes.

So her statement of contrition could not have come at a worse time. Since the previous December, she had not shown the slightest sign of public remorse, and had routinely said that she had no comment whenever a reporter got near her. Now the 100-pound blonde who had come to embody all the ills of America’s latest age of greed—who had withdrawn $15.5 million from her account in the Madoff offices in the weeks before her husband confessed his Ponzi scheme, who, with Bernie’s brother, Peter, had posted her husband’s $10 million bond, and who had fought to keep her houses and property—was actually claiming to be a victim herself.

The outrage was universal.

“Hey Ruth, give up the $2.5 million for your husband[’s] thievery. And get your ass to work to pay all the restit[uti]on!” was just one of the vitriolic comments on the Los Angeles Times Web site. On the New York Times Web site, a reader wrote, “$2.5 million? I would leave her with $5,000 plus whatever Social Security she has coming. Would be good to see her begging with a cardboard sign on Wall Street.” Another took to verse: “Ms. Madoff will never let go / Of that 2.5 million or so, / And those bank accounts hidden / Will be at her biddin’ / That’s the way settlements go!”

Ruth Madoff said in her statement, “From the moment I learned from my husband that he had committed an enormous fraud, I have had two thoughts—first, that so many people who trusted him would be ruined financially and emotionally, and second, that my life with the man I have known for over 50 years was over.”

The comedian Andy Borowitz savagely parodied this on the Huffington Post: “Just hours after her husband Bernie Madoff was sentenced … Ruth Madoff expressed shock and dismay at her husband’s behavior, telling reporters, ‘This is not the man I owned nine homes with. When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars with someone, you think you know him.… I guess I was wrong.’” On the New York Times Web site, a furious observer said, “Wow, it was all his fault, you had nothing to do with it? Really? Is that the depth of your apology for the last 50 years of enjoying the plunder from charities and pensioners? Really? You would have done better to keep silent. This is repugnant.”

“The word ‘façade’ kept popping into my mind,” says Ronnie Sue Ambrosino, who lost $1.7 million to Madoff and whose husband read a statement in court. “This is somebody covering their own back! Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt; let’s say she knew nothing. On December 11, the day of Bernie’s arrest, she knew everything, and she had every opportunity to show the sorrow she spoke about in her statement, but she didn’t until it served her purpose. She continued to have arrogance for the victims and hide behind the façade of supposed sorrow, just as her husband had.”

In the course of writing three stories on the Madoff case for Vanity Fair, I’ve spoken to close to 100 people who knew Ruth, Bernie, and their family, and the majority believe that Ruth must have known about the scheme. Otherwise, if she was embarrassed, ashamed, betrayed, and confused, as she said in her statement, why did she stay with Bernie during his three months of house arrest—apparently at the cost of losing her sons, Mark and Andrew, who say they haven’t spoken to their mother since the still not fully explained day in their parents’ kitchen when Bernie confessed his crime to them with Ruth standing nearby? She’s still under scrutiny by investigators, as are her sons, Bernie’s brother, and Frank DiPascali Jr. and Annette Bongiorno, who directed Madoff’s investment-advisory business, on the 17th floor of the Lipstick Building, in Manhattan. One longtime observer of the Madoffs told me that Ruth’s statement, like everything preceding it in the case, may very well be just one more example of Bernie Madoff’s brilliance at deception and manipulation. He always ran the show, and probably still does, the observer believes. From the day he turned himself in and pleaded guilty, Madoff was determined to take the fall alone. He continues from behind bars to try to control every detail of his destiny, including, at least one person is willing to venture, Ruth’s statement.

“Like everyone else, I feel betrayed and confused,” Ruth wrote. “The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years.”

But the life she led with Bernie—and the one she continued to share with him from his arrest onward—tells a dramatically different story.

Ruthie from Queens

It pains me so much to remember my husband getting up in the middle of the night. He was a very fine physician. He would get up in the middle of the night year after year in all kinds of weather to go to the hospital to save someone’s life in rain, ice and snow. He would save someone’s life so that Bernie Madoff could buy his wife another Cartier watch. —Statement read in court by Maureen Ebel, Madoff victim.

‘I thought she was one of the Belle Harbor girls,” says Millie Tirado, who attended Far Rockaway High School with Ruth and Bernie, referring to the affluent Queens community that was home to “the golden girls, the girls with money, whose parents did not have to worry about sending them to college.” But Ruth was from Laurelton, a middle-class community in Queens, and her single-family house was already a major step up for her parents, Saul and Sara Alpern, who had moved there from an apartment building in Brooklyn. “Laurelton was Siberia, as far as we knew,” continues Tirado. Although “Ruthie,” as everyone called her, didn’t live in Belle Harbor, she strove to be the Belle Harbor type. “She was very well groomed, a real blonde, plus she didn’t look Jewish—she looked Waspy, Doris Day–ish.” A cheerleader as well as an honors student, Ruthie was voted “Josie College,” and everyone agreed that she was destined for big things.

Along came tough, cocky Bernie, who worked as a lifeguard and a part-time sprinkler-system installer, and who once said he didn’t like a book because it contained “hardly any pictures.” Ruth fell in love with him by 14. They were neighbors in Laurelton—she lived on 224th Street, he on 228th—and rode to school together every day. Whereas a childhood friend remembers Ruth’s parents as an intelligent, politically liberal couple who played bridge, read The New York Times, and summered in the Catskills, nobody remembers much about Bernie’s, except for the tsuris they got into with the S.E.C., in 1963, over the registration of a broker-dealer firm apparently run out of their home.

“Bernie being a lifeguard was a joke,” says Tirado. “I think he was really a cabana boy. In his off time, when he wasn’t tending to the cabanas, he had to watch the kiddie pool. I don’t have a recollection of him as an actual lifeguard. It was a very tough exam, and I don’t think he was a super athlete. He was always at the periphery with that trademark smirk. I pretty much had my pick of guys, and I wouldn’t put him out if he was on fire. There was something really creepy about him.”

Bernie’s best friend then, according to one classmate, thought Ruth at 15 was “an airhead.” Some, however, insist that she was the smarter of the two. They were married at the Laurelton Jewish Center on the weekend after Thanksgiving 1959, and from that day forward Ruth made her man her mission. “I don’t play the role of courtesan very well,” Carmen Dell’Orefice, the supermodel and longtime Madoff investor and friend, told me, referring to the type of woman who is always “deferring to a man’s wishes against her own.”

“Did Ruth?,” I asked her.

“To perfection!”

Ruth Madoff caught unawares in the East 64th Street penthouse in January, while Bernie, out on bail, was still living there with her. From Newyorksocialdiary.com.

Ruth soon brought her husband together with her father, an accountant, and that was the beginning of everything. “Saul and Sara Alpern were plain and simple, good people, no-nonsense. Charm was not in their vocabulary—they told it like it was,” says Michael Bienes, who joined Saul Alpern’s firm as a junior accountant in the 1960s and was soon feeding clients to Madoff. “Easy, easy-peasey, like a money machine” is how Bienes described on Frontline Madoff’s strong and steady returns over the years. He tells me that Saul Alpern thought his son-in-law was “the Second Coming. Never any doubt.…He promoted Bernie to family, clients, and friends.” In a 1990s video, bespectacled Saul dances with his beloved Sara, a wry grin on his face. He was known for his “sharp sense of humor,” explains Bienes, and for living “simply and without pretense.” Alpern provided the launching pad for the grandiose life his daughter and son-in-law would eventually achieve.

“I think Saul Alpern was the mastermind of Bernie Madoff’s original fund-raising template: promise 20 percent, and bring in more investors,” says Erin Arvedlund, who blew the whistle on Madoff in a largely unheeded story in Barron’s in 2001, and whose book, Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff, will be published this month. As Saul was “going around to his friends and accounting clients to get some initial money for Bernie,” according to Arvedlund, “Ruth and Bernie worked together out of Ruth’s father’s office.” It was near Grand Central Terminal, in Manhattan. Ruth wrote in a book for the 50th reunion of her Far Rockaway High School class, “After college I married Bernie Madoff, F.R.H.S. class of ‘55. Bernie and I worked together in the investment business he founded in 1960.” Michael Bienes says, “Ruthie was always with Bernie. I saw her almost every time I was in his office. She looked busy.” Woe to anyone who dared to besmirch her husband’s name, Bienes adds. “Get this: I take Ruthie to lunch. She wears a man’s watch and says, ‘This is what I only wear—I don’t like jewelry.’ Huh! I made a joke about Bernie. She turned on me and said, ‘My Bernie is the most honest man in the world!’”

“She wasn’t this dumb blonde—she was smart with numbers,” says Erin Arvedlund. “So I find it hard to believe that if Ruth’s father was one of Bernie’s original fund-raisers, and she was there at the inception helping keep the books, how could she not know that Bernie had an ‘advisory business’ and that he was not registered with the S.E.C. [until 2006]? Was it a Ponzi scheme at that point? I don’t know.”

From an $87-a-month apartment in Bayside, Queens, with one bedroom and a schnauzer named Muffin, the newlyweds began their rise. After sailing through Queens College while Bernie plodded through the University of Alabama and Hofstra, Ruth went from bookkeeping to mothering their two boys, Mark and Andrew. “Nobody was a career woman in those days,” says a friend, adding, “I spoke to her every single day, and I know she was at home with the kids—no nanny.” A former female Madoff trader adds, “I know it was tough for her, raising the kids. Bernie was not around a lot—traveling or just working. She was at one point crying about how hard it was to raise the boys.”

They moved from an apartment in Bayside to a bigger apartment in Great Neck, on Long Island, and then to a house at 73 Dianas Trail in the suburb of Roslyn, where their neighbors were future New York Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon and his wife, Judy, and Long Island developer Edward Blumenfeld and his wife, Susan. “Eddie” became Bernie’s closest friend and an investor who would suffer heavy losses in the Ponzi scheme. Susan became the Madoffs’ image guru, establishing the look in their homes and offices. She also seems to have transformed Ruth from simple Ruthie Alpern from Queens into Mrs. Bernard L. Madoff of Upper East Side Manhattan, Montauk, Palm Beach, and Cap d’Antibes.

On the Web site of Susan Blumenfeld Interiors, whose clients range from Gloria Vanderbilt to Universal Music Group, Blumenfeld appears thin and flaxen-haired, wearing a crisp white T-shirt and a dark blazer. “The Madoffs did a lot of antiquing but would not buy a piece of furniture, not even the tiniest thing, without Susan’s approval,” says Julia Fenwick, who ran Madoff’s London office. “They would take pictures of things and send them to Susan. If Susan didn’t like it, they wouldn’t buy it. Susan was a very independent woman, and Ruth really looked up to her, because Ruth wasn’t independent. Ruth was absolutely under Bernie’s thumb. If Bernie said, ‘Jump,’ Ruth would say, ‘How high?’ If her makeup was slightly off, he’d say, ‘What happened to your face?’ For Ruth, looking good was all for Bernie.

“I was told by Shana Madoff [Bernie’s niece and a compliance lawyer in his firm] that Ruth would not buy any clothing without Susan’s approval,” Fenwick continues. “They went everywhere together, and she would wear a lot of the same clothes as Susan. They were kind of like clones—everything was very basic, straightforward. Neither would go out on a limb.” With her Susan-approved wardrobe and accessories (Prada and Goyard handbags, Susan Bennis Warren Edwards crocodile-leather flats), her hair colored Soft Baby Blonde (maintained at the Pierre Michel Salon, on East 57th Street, whose owners asked her not to return after Bernie’s arrest), her skinny, firm figure (toned by a trainer at Equinox), and her taut face (tucked by plastic surgeries, one of which turned out badly and left her hospitalized), Ruth emerged as the perfectly preserved and packaged society wife.

The Other Side of Ruth

Some rough edges, however, not even Susan Blumenfeld could erase. “Ruth has a deep voice, a Queens brogue that could get loud,” says Carmen Dell’Orefice. “And, boy, if she wanted to let you know something, she had good projection. Whereas Bernie had a quiet voice, Ruth would be Oh, my God, the traffic! or Oh, the clothes were wonderful!” A social leader in East Hampton, who hosted two charity benefits the Madoffs attended, told me, “I found Ruth and Bernie to be most peculiar. They said hello when they came in and good-bye when they left—otherwise, not a word. Not ‘It’s a nice party, thank you for having us.’ Nothing. It was more than rude. It was like I didn’t exist.”

Sisterhood was limited for Ruth, especially when it came to Bernie’s brother Peter’s wife, Marion, a tall, full-figured, outgoing brunette. “Ruth treated Marion as if she was a little bit of a second-class citizen,” says Julia Fenwick. Marion wasn’t Susan-approved. She dared to wear color. “Marion had her own style, which was terrific, and Ruth would dress like Susan—white pants, white shirts, white shoes. Susan and Ruth would give Marion a look that was like ‘You are not the same.’”

Beneath Ruth’s bluster was a mass of insecurity. “Ruth always felt her sister-in-law was more attractive, more long-legged than she was,” says a friend. “I always thought Ruth was more attractive and more fun, but that was her perception of herself. She would talk about Marion’s long legs, which she didn’t have, and how Marion was a better golfer.”

In Ruth’s world, the landscape was filled with younger, taller women. “I brought my fiancé to a stany [Securities Traders Association of New York] party, and the two of us were talking to Ruth, who kept looking over my fiancé’s shoulder at Bernie talking to two women, one of whom was a blonde,” says a guest.

“If they were prettier, I’d be worried,” Ruth said.

“You’re a beautiful woman,” the guest’s fiancé said. “Why would you be jealous if Bernie talked to a pretty woman?”

“Because I’m the only woman he ever dated,” Ruth answered, which the guest’s fiancé took to mean that she felt that the slightest temptation might open the floodgates of Bernie’s natural desires. “The rules of society didn’t apply to him,” says the guest.

“In London we hired a very pretty receptionist last year,” remembers Julia Fenwick. “And Bernie came over and said, ‘Ruth would never let me hire somebody who looks like that in New York. She vets the women who work in the office there.’ She knew he was terribly flirtatious. He would come up with really inappropriate things, and you’d think, Jesus, Bernie!” A female trader recalls, “We had a belly dancer at one of our Christmas parties. I remember looking at the other female traders and thinking, Did they think we would find this entertaining? It was completely insensitive to have a belly dancer at an office Christmas party. I remember saying, ‘This is so inappropriate! What does Ruth think?’ And someone said, ‘Ruth is the one who booked the belly dancer!’”

Bernie depended on her, both as wife and watchdog. “Nothing gets by Ruth,” he would say. She paid the bills at his early New York office, at 110 Wall Street. “Any kind of vendor that charged us for anything, from electricity to charge cards, any bill that came into the office went to Ruth,” says Eleanor Squillari, Bernie’s longtime secretary, who also assisted Ruth in the 1980s. In her little office near the trading room, Ruth would sit, checkbook out, files at the ready, a picture of perfect efficiency, while her husband tended to the trading, confident that she always had his back.

The Madoffs on Norman Levy’s yacht. By Carmen Dell’Orefice.

“I wanted to open an M.R.I. center, but I didn’t have the money,” says a physician who approached longtime Madoff investor Robert Gettinger for the financing. Gettinger told him at the last minute that he would be bringing Bernie Madoff into the deal, with each of them investing $150,000 for what would be a limited partnership. “But when I got the check, it didn’t come from Bernie Madoff—it came from Ruth Madoff,” says the physician. “I asked him, ‘I thought the investor was Bernie Madoff, so why is the check from Ruth Madoff?’ And he said, ‘He does his investments through his wife.’” (Gettinger didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Mrs. Bernard L. Madoff

I have reread Madoff’s March 12 statement to you. Certain quotes jumped out at me. His continuing self-serving references, and I quote, that his proprietary trading in the market-making business managed by his brother and two sons was legitimate, profitable, and successful in all respects, or that he felt “compelled to satisfy my clients’ expectations at any cost.” It sounds as if he is laying the blame on his clients’ expectations and never admitting the truth he was stealing from these clients and the lives he ruined. If he was attempting to protect his family, he should not be given that opportunity, because we, the victims, did not have the same opportunity to protect our families. Madoff the beast has stolen our ability to protect our loved ones away from us. He should have no opportunity to protect his family. —Sheryl Weinstein, Madoff victim.

Eventually, Bernie hired a full-time financial executive to take over the billing and banking. “And Ruth eased her way out,” says Squillari. But Ruth still wrote checks on her husband’s behalf. Most mornings she left a to-do list for Bernie. And her name pops up frequently in the hundreds of pages of Madoff documents recently released by the bankruptcy trustee. The papers, which track the ebb and flow of billions of dollars, also show that many of Madoff’s assets were in Ruth’s name. “The books and records of BLMIS [Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities] show that Madoff also used BLMIS funds to purchase assets for his personal enjoyment and that of his family,” reads one affidavit. “Madoff and his family created a web of shell companies to hold these assets after purchasing same with BLMIS funds. For example, BLMIS funds were used to purchase and maintain two yachts, the first in 2003 and the second in 2007. . . .These yachts were used by Madoff and his family and served no apparent business purpose. The second yacht, named Bull, is held by Yacht Bull Corporation, a corporation in which Ruth Madoff has an interest.”

Another company to which Madoff made substantial loans is Madoff Technologies, L.L.C., “owned in part by Ruth Madoff,” according to the affidavit. Yet Ruth seemed like a technological neophyte. “I worked with her in her private office, teaching her how to send digital photographs,” says computer tutor Lonson MacCargar. “She wasn’t a computer whiz. I don’t think she’s capable of managing online banking. The extent of her computer knowledge is e-mail and sending photos to her children and grandchildren.”

‘I think she struggled, like so many wives of successful men do, to forge her own identity,” says a friend. She went back to school to get a master’s degree in nutrition at New York University, which included working in a health center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She gave her time and money to charities and educational endeavors, played golf, went to matinees on Broadway—keeping herself free for the ritual 6:30, 45-minute dinner in a restaurant with Bernie. She came to play the role of the financial icon’s spouse expertly. “So controlled she was almost like a robot,” says one former employee. “She was normal, normal, normal—nothing but normal,” says a friend. “Her family came first,” says another. Others call her “nice,” “fun,” “unpretentious,” “a terrific friend,” “a mensch,” “a class act.” Her landscaper of 25 years says, “The only Ruth Madoff I know is so loving, so intelligent, so respectful of my work.” A friend of her son Mark’s says that with the Madoff family there were “no airs, no snobbery,” adding that both Ruth and Bernie were always gracious and warm. “She was a hot mom,” says another. She was very proud of Mark and Andrew, and, as one friend puts it, “she adored her sons.” Yet they almost all add, “Somebody’s got to prove to me that she wasn’t in on the whole thing.”

She was certainly a way into Madoff’s fund. One old Laurelton friend, after not seeing Ruth for 50 years but knowing she had become Mrs. Bernard L. Madoff, cold-called Bernie to try to wheedle his way into investing. Bernie said he was beyond closed—besides, he had a $2 million minimum. “He said, ‘By the way, Ruthie’s here. Want to talk to her?’” the friend remembers, and for 30 minutes he and Ruth reminisced. When Bernie came back on the phone, he said, “You know what? We’ve known each other a long time. You can come in.”

Some Classy Projects

On vacation at their Montauk beach house in the late 1980s, Ruth joined other well-off wives in cooking classes at the Sapore di Mare restaurant, in East Hampton. “She was this little skinny barrel of a woman, like a bull,” remembers chef Mark Strausman, who taught the classes. Ruth and Idee German Schoenheimer, whose husband, Pierre, is a financier, came up with an idea for a book: The Great Chefs of America Cook Kosher. They asked almost 50 famous chefs, including Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse, and Alice Waters, to provide kosher recipes for their favorite dishes. Ruth and Idee enlisted an editor and then self-published the book—“They spent a fortune on it,” says Strausman.

Ruth talked the chefs into donating their recipes. “This is what pissed me off: she sold the deal to me like ‘You’ll get so much press! It’ll be so good for you!’” remembers Strausman. “I thought, What do you mean, good for me? This is the kind of woman she was: you did her a favor and she turned it around that she’s doing you a favor.”

Ruth took her team into the Madoff offices in the Lipstick Building, where they worked on the cookbook in a spare room. The book opened important doors, especially for Ruth. “Ruth was a fucking social climber,” says an insider. “For a little lady, she clawed onto the ladder and climbed it.” Idee Schoenheimer became a connection in the Hamptons. Schoenheimer also invested in Bernie’s fund, as did at least one of the chefs who provided recipes, Nancy Silverton, who runs the restaurant Osteria Mozza, in Los Angeles. (Silverton invested through Beverly Hills money manager Stanley Chais. Chais has been sued by both the court-appointed Madoff bankruptcy trustee and the Securities and Exchange Commission. He has denied any wrongdoing.) “Idee got conned more than anybody,” says a friend. “She was the one who invited Ruth and Bernie into her home for 20 years. Can you imagine what she must feel like? The obsessive-compulsive guy, who was so picky about his food, and the wife who facilitated him? … People lost money with Ivan Boesky, but it wasn’t done around dining-room tables and fireplaces in people’s homes. Madoff did it to friends at family affairs—weddings, Seders. People they summered with in the South of France. Now these people are walking around dazed, thinking, When we were in the South of France eating bouillabaisse, did Ruth know we were being conned?”

Once the cookbook was published, Ruth and Idee hit the media circuit, including what Strausman remembers as a torturous appearance on television. “I went on CNN with Ruth and Idee, and they were both petrified,” he says. “I remember something happening and Ruth snapping at me.… She’s a hundred pounds soaking wet, but when she opens her mouth it’s like a hurricane coming out.” In recent years, the hurricane roared again at Strausman, in Fred’s, the restaurant he runs in Barneys New York. “She’s walking out, and I say, ‘How are you?’ and she says, ‘Not happy!’ She points to the poor maître d’ and says, ‘He gave me a bad table!’” Strausman tried to smooth things over. “But Ruth was inconsolable—really, really nasty. I wanted to say to her, ‘How would you expect him to know who you are? And who are you anyway? You’re just another short Jewish lady on the Upper East Side, for God’s sake!’ But Ruth was nasty. Red. It was like an exorcism.”

Proceeds from the cookbook were to benefit the Jewish National Fund, but a representative from the fund says it received no money. The book also spurred the threat of a copyright-infringement lawsuit, from the “Great Chefs” television shows, books, and videos, whose chairman, John Shoup, says the women brazenly lifted the name without permission. He eventually had to threaten them with a cease-and-desist order to make them stop distributing the book.

How to reconcile the red Ruth, ranting in restaurants, with the blonde Ruth, cool and collected around the country club, at the charity event, in the boardroom? “She was conflicted,” says Michael Skakun, a freelance writer, who, along with another writer, Ken Libo, was summoned to the Madoff penthouse in late 2003. Ruth wanted to create a special gift for Bernie’s 65th birthday, and Skakun immediately noticed the contradictions in her. “I saw a woman who was very artificially made up … Botoxed … sort of artificial and frozen—her face, her home.” In an article published in the Forward in 2008, after the scandal broke, Skakun and Libo described the apartment as “Queens High Baroque,” such a cold, austere, over-the-top interior that Ruth led them into the kitchen, saying they’d be more comfortable there. “It’s haimish here,” said Ruth, employing the Yiddish word for informal, which Skakun took to mean: I’m just a plain, outer-borough girl entombed in a stage set reflecting someone else’s image of success.

Confessed fraudster Bernard Madoff bilked investors, friends, and philanthropists alike as part of his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. How did he do it? And how was he found out? Visit our Madoff archive](/video.html?videoID=1452799001&lineupID=14015223001) to find out.

For four hours she described what she wanted, “a birthday present he won’t forget.… Maybe a surprise scrapbook, you know—pictures, photos, invitations, the works.” She brought out albums of snapshots and artifacts from her life with Bernie. “Other men slow down, take it easy,” she said. “Not him. He’s got the world on his head.” But even as she spoke, Skakun felt that she was actually talking herself out of the project. “She said he was a very secretive person,” he remembers. But here she was opening up her husband’s life to two strangers, whom she called the next day to say she had decided to scrap the idea. “It was a paradox, wanting to do something special, which she knew would be transgressive,” says Skakun. “She felt she was treading on thin ice, and I think she was disappointed and angry, maybe at herself and maybe at her husband, that he was so secretive that she couldn’t do something to please him.”

Try as Ruth might to forge her own identity, it was inscrutably tied to her husband’s. She kept a place for herself in the office, not as the high-level power broker or financier she is often described to be, but mainly as a wife and mother. “I go to the office,” she is said to have told a friend, “to keep Bernie from killing our sons.”

Before the Deluge

I cry every day when I see the look of pain and despair in my husband’s eyes. I cry for the life we once had before that monster took it away. Our two sons and daughter-in-law have rallied with constant love and support. You, on the other hand, Mr. Madoff, have two sons that despise you. Your wife, rightfully so, has been vilified and shunned by her friends in the community. You have left your children a legacy of shame. I have a marriage made in heaven. You have a marriage made in hell, and that is where you, Mr. Madoff, are going to return. May God spare you no mercy. —Marcia FitzMaurice, Madoff victim.

‘The characterization given of Ruth as being low-key, not flashy, is not correct,” says an individual who served with her on the board of the Queens College Foundation. “She had a very large amount of wealth, a big diamond—and I mean big—and a Mercedes with a driver.”

Ruth regularly gave this friend lifts to board meetings. During one ride she said, “Bernie and I are going on vacation in Cap d’Antibes. We have a boat there.”

“How long you going for?” her passenger asked.

“About two months.”

“Two months! How can Bernie leave the business for two months?”

“Oh, we can go away because the boys [Mark and Andrew Madoff] handle the business.” The board member adds, “That stuck with me, because either the kids were in on the nuts and bolts of the business or there is no business.” (The Madoff sons did not work for the fraudulent investment-advisory part of their father’s company.)

Ruth was a shareholder in her husband’s London business, for which “she was paid a dividend each year of less than $200,000,” says someone close to the operation. She also kept an office on the 18th floor of the Lipstick Building, where she and Bernie would frequently arrive at work together. Like him, she was extremely secretive. Ruth had an account with Cohmad Securities, the brokerage firm established by Madoff and his longtime friend Maurice “Sonny” Cohn. According to the court-appointed trustee who is charged with liquidating Madoff’s company and recovering funds for investors, Cohmad and what Erin Arvedlund calls its “top individual free-market fund-raisers” were paid hundreds of millions of dollars for steering high-end clients into Madoff’s advisory arm. “Cohmad was like having an A.T.M. in your house, but only certain people in the firm had access to it, and one of those people was Ruth Madoff,” says Arvedlund. “And all of her Cohmad money was in cash.”

When former Madoff employees speak of Ruth, they invariably bring up the company Christmas party at the Rosa Mexicano restaurant on December 10, the day before Bernie’s arrest. That same day, according to his sons, Bernie had confessed his crime to them with Ruth standing nearby in their penthouse, but at the party Ruth and Bernie acted as if nothing were wrong, as if Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities were rock-solid. “Ruth was at the party, staring at these people, knowing they were penniless,” says someone who knows her, adding that Ruth reportedly said at the party that she and Bernie were going to Florida for the holidays.

After Madoff was arrested, Ruth and Peter Madoff posted his $10 million bond and he returned to the two-level penthouse on East 64th Street. A week later he got into a pushing-and-shoving scene with a mob of reporters and cameramen staked out in front of the building.

Ruth promptly began dealing with the aftershocks and the finances. She called Angela Gonther, their real-estate broker in the South of France, who had sold them their town house in Cap d’Antibes, where they spent eight weeks a year. (“Her French was pretty good—his wasn’t,” Gonther told Janelle Lassonde, who wrote about the Madoffs in “French Lessons,” her weekly blog from Cap d’Antibes.)

“Are you willing to talk to me?,” Ruth asked Gonther, according to Lassonde.

“Of course,” said Gonther.

“What’s the town house worth?” asked Ruth.

A few months later, it was unloaded for $1.4 million to Russian buyers. The Madoffs’ Peugeot was also sold, and one of their boats, which they had bought for $7 million, was put on the market. Its captain, Bruno, who calls Ruth “Madame,” is reportedly staying on until the boat is sold.

Ruth believed that her husband might be allowed to stay at home with her until his case was sorted out. Even after Judge Denny Chin revoked Madoff’s bail, on March 12, and ordered him to jail, Ruth still held out hope that he would be able to spend the time until his sentencing with her. But Bernie would never return to the apartment.

Home Alone

From then on, Ruth Madoff’s very existence—and freedom—served as an insult to her husband’s victims. the loneliest woman in new york was the headline of an article about her in The New York Times, which Ruth certainly read, because she read everything about the case; she became so haunted by the incessant coverage that she considered a day without their name in the papers a blessing. “Everyone assumes that she knew,” says an old friend of Ruth’s, who lost everything to Madoff. “I hate to speak of her like she is dead,” says another. But the woman Ruth Madoff once was—the seemingly perfect wife, mother, grandmother, cook, charity lady, and sportswoman—died on December 11. Her sons wouldn’t, or couldn’t, speak to her. Former investors wanted her head. Her fortune was gone, and until she cut the deal with prosecutors to retain $2.5 million in exchange for surrendering everything else, the former world-class shopper who would charge through Paris powered by AmEx (“Get both!” she once encouraged a shopping companion, who couldn’t decide between two extravagant items) was suddenly reduced to a debit card.

Her accounts were frozen; she couldn’t even get access to her Social Security checks. Deprived of funds, she subsisted on chili, chicken, and skirt steak, while petitioning the government to pay her monthly bills and the upkeep on her and her husband’s properties until they could be sold off to repay investors. As soon as she got one month paid, bills for the next month would come roaring in. Bernie was the only man she had ever loved, and now he was all she had left.

Among Ruth’s first concerns was the press. Reporters vultured her 24-7, so rabid they followed one neighbor down the street, thinking she was Ruth. She knew they would be waiting for her at the jail as well, but she defied them—she’d crawl through a pack of mongrel dogs to see Bernie.

She visited him every Monday at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where she would try to buoy his spirits while hers sank. She had to wear clothing without zippers—any trace of metal would set off the detectors and cancel her visit—and nothing revealing or exposed. Always insecure about her appearance, that part was easy for Ruth. But she couldn’t see Bernie with imperfect hair, so she called a nearby salon and asked them to send someone over to give her a haircut, and not to breathe a word about it, especially to the media. She sent Bernie books to get his mind off his troubles, and she collected quarters and dollar bills to take to him so that he could buy junk food from the jailhouse vending machines. This was quite a comedown for a person whose AmEx bills, released by the bankruptcy trustee—just one of an endless array of humiliating documents illustrating the ebb and flow of billions of Madoff dollars—showed charges one month alone of tens of thousands for clothing and charity donations.

She called her incarcerated spouse Doll, Darling, Baby, and Sweetie. She tried not to be dull or depressing; she wanted to be at her best for him. The visits were always over way too quickly, and she would take a taxi back home. The television gave her little comfort. “I don’t care how dumb you are. There is no way that you can … think that they’re not going to take this money from you. Ruth, you might as well just give it up, honey!” exclaimed Whoopi Goldberg one day on The View, chuckling with her co-hosts about the desperate housewife trying to hang on to her ill-gotten assets. Those assets were all evidence now, spoils of the crime, which she had to catalogue and report to government investigators and bankruptcy trustees, who were selling off what she and Bernie had spent a lifetime painstakingly collecting. With many of her friends transformed into victims, the notion that she was allowed to remain free and unfettered while her husband sat in jail before his sentencing must have seemed like a ludicrous joke to Ruth. To compound the pain and punishment, she believed she would be left broke and alone, and without any foreseeable future.

Ruth in an unguarded moment, circa 2000, in the affluent years leading up to Bernie Madoff’s confession and arrest. By Carmen Dell’Orefice.

So she sat in her penthouse with the shades drawn and—to save money—the air-conditioning off. Only a handful of her bravest friends and closest relatives came to visit, as they might visit a patient with a terminal disease, bringing her fish, videos, and her favorite candy, Peanut Chews. She tried not to dwell on the $65 billion her husband had defrauded from investors and institutions. To Ruth this may have been a situation, a predicament, in which Bernie had gotten himself entrapped—something that happened to him, not some diabolical scheme he had devised and orchestrated. She believed that somehow time would return to her what she treasured most: her family. She managed to have quick meetings with her grandchildren, but always without their fathers present. Her sister, Joan, came to see her. But how often could Joan and her husband make the trip from Boca Raton? (Joan’s name was also on Bernie’s victims list—stung for $2.7 million, while her husband got hit for $8.7 million.)

Other visitors arrived hungry, which meant Ruth had to spend money she didn’t have for food and drink. Whereas before she had dined at the best restaurants, with no thought of the tariff, now she fretted over the tiniest expenditure. When the guests were gone, the woman who had once sailed the world on private yachts, her every whim tended to by a captain and crew, would dust and mop her apartment.

Good-bye, Secrecy and Privacy

Six months have passed. I manage on food stamps. At the end of the month I sometimes scavenge in Dumpsters. I cannot afford new eyeglasses. I long to go to a concert, but I never do. Sometimes my heart beats erratically for lack of medication when I cannot pay for it. I shine my shoes each night, afraid they will wear out. My laundry is done by hand in the kitchen sink. I have collected empty cans and dragged them to redemption centers.… By self-admission, this thief among us knew his victims were facing a kind of death at his hands, yet he continued to play with us as a cat would with a mouse. —Miriam Siegman, Madoff victim.

The items so carefully selected—the $39,000 Steinway, the $35,000 Lavar Kerman Persian rug, the $20,000 Chippendale-style tea table—only reminded Ruth of what had once been. As the walls closed in, she had to get out, but she dreaded it. Her first public appearance had left her in a constant state of panic. On March 19, six days after Bernie went to jail, she had barreled out into the chilly New York night, trailed by a bodyguard and her building’s superintendent, hurrying past two photographers, headed toward Third Avenue to go grocery shopping at the Food Emporium.

The cameras caught a woman who bore no trace of the blonde in a much-reproduced May 2008 photograph of her and Bernie in Mexico, drinking white wine and eating white fish. Immaculately tanned, toned, and perfectly preserved, looking at least a decade younger than her 67 years, Ruth wore a crisp white jacket and a Mona Lisa smile. Now, 10 months later, with a ski cap pulled down low, she wore a bulky coat over a hooded orange sweatshirt with a white polo shirt underneath. She looked tired and pale, and a smear of lipstick defined her pout. “I had trouble believing it was her,” says Joe Marino, who took a photo of Ruth for the New York Daily News. “She looked haggard and extremely distressed, like she’d aged 15 years.” When the photographers chased her into the grocery, Ruth pushed her shopping cart into a shelf and snapped, “Forget this—this is crazy!” Then she walked out of the store and back to her apartment.

Later outings were equally frustrating, each episode pushing her deeper into Leona Helmsley territory in the public’s eye. May 11: “Ruth Madoff, in sunglasses, schlepping a roller bag (filled with jewelry?) north on Lexington Avenue at 60th,” read the Post. June 25: when photographed by the Post while riding the subway, sitting under an ad for a 99-cent cell-phone deal, she said, “Are you having fun embarrassing me and ruining my life?” (“Ruth Madoff Takes F Train to Schadenfreude Station,” snickered Gothamist.com.)

Actually, she went out undetected more often than not. A guard in her building would alert her when the coast was clear of paparazzi, and she would escape to a movie or occasionally a play, always looking over her shoulder for fear of running into one of her husband’s former investors. She loves the theater. As time went on, she felt she couldn’t afford taxis, so she would walk to theaters, where she could be invisible for a couple of hours. But when the lights went up, she was a pariah again. Hours on end she sat beside a phone that didn’t ring, in her lonely apartment, reading books, waiting for sleep to rescue her.

The bad press was relentless. In Ruth’s eyes, Vanity Fair was the lowest of the low. She considered the stories written by me—especially my collaboration with Bernie’s longtime secretary, Eleanor Squillari—the worst of them all. (Meanwhile, her son Andrew has told friends that Eleanor’s story was terrific.) The New York Daily News was doubtless second on Ruth’s media shitlist, for reporting that Bernie had had an affair with an executive assistant at a major media company a decade or so ago.

In June, things seemed to look up for Ruth as some reports raised doubts about her complicity. Court documents indicated that Ruth and her sister, Joan, were co-trustees of trusts created by their parents, and that assets from these trusts had been invested in Madoff’s fraudulent business. Why would Ruth deliberately place family money in a Ponzi scheme? Attorney Jerry Reisman, who represents 16 Madoff victims, with claims in excess of $150 million, says the fact that Ruth invested the money in her husband’s fund lowers her possible complicity in the deception—which he’d previously ranked at 100 percent—to around 95 percent. “No wife who inherits money from a parent gives that money to a husband who she believes or knows is conducting an investor fraud,” he says. “That investment dates back to 1999. At least up until that period, to my knowledge, she had no knowledge of the fraud.” In mid-summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that, according to two sources, “federal investigators have concluded for now there is no physical evidence that Ruth Madoff, the wife of convicted swindler Bernard Madoff, actively participated in or concealed her husband’s fraud.”

On June 26, some financial relief came when Ruth cut her deal with U.S. prosecutors, forfeiting the right to assets valued at $80 million in exchange for $2.5 million, money that may be tied to older real-estate holdings. “In compromise of claims ruth madoff would have pursued, the Office [of the U.S. attorney] will not contest ruth madoff’s claim to a sum of money equal to $2,500,000 … which sum the Office shall cause to be tendered to ruth madoff promptly after she vacates the real property and surrenders all personal property,” the court order reads. (Ruth may still be liable to civil claims.)

At noon on July 2, six U.S. marshals arrived to take possession of the 133 East 64th Street penthouse, which was in Ruth’s name, and where she and Bernie had lived since 1984. The marshals had a court order to seize the $7 million property and all of its contents as restitution to the victims. It was yet another public-relations nightmare for Ruth, with the Associated Press reporting that she argued with the marshals and asked to keep a fur, which the marshals made her leave behind. (I was informed that she knew about the eviction well in advance and told the marshals she would need the coat for the coming winter. Ruth’s attorney said that she had forfeited the fur days earlier in accordance with an agreement with the court.) She looked grim as she exited, with nothing but a straw beach bag, while a small crowd jeered. “What goes around comes around,” one bystander told the New York Post. “Go get a job now like the rest of us slobs!” screamed another. “Show us the money!”

Coda

For Bernie’s 70th birthday, on April 29, 2008, Ruth planned a party on a starlit beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. A dozen of the Madoffs’ best friends, some of whom were investors, gathered to celebrate the great man of the markets, and Ruth had commissioned orange sweatshirts embroidered with “blm est. 1938” over the heart. The polite, pleasant, perfectly put-together Ruth, consummate wife and hostess, presided over cocktails and dinner, serenaded by the crashing waves and kissed by the ocean breezes off the Sea of Cortez. But soon after people began making toasts, the red Ruth came roaring out. “Bernie’s brother, Peter, got up and said how much he loved his brother, and Ed Blumenfeld talked about how Bernie was such a great guy,” says Julia Fenwick, who attended the event.

Next, one of Bernie’s longtime friends and associates stood up. He raised his glass and praised Madoff for his brilliance and accomplishments. Then, in what was supposed to be a funny aside, he added, “And, Bernie, you know you’re a complete shyster.”

“Everybody laughed,” Fenwick remembers. “But Ruth went nuts. She screamed at the guest, ‘You’re a complete shit! How dare you say that to Bernie? All the things he’s done for you, and you treat him like this? You’re out of order!’ And he said, ‘Ruth, I was just roasting him!’ But Ruth went absolutely crazy, at the table, in front of everybody, saying ‘fuck’ and ‘shit,’ and wouldn’t let the matter drop. The party was kind of over after that.”

Confessed fraudster Bernard Madoff bilked investors, friends, and philanthropists alike as part of his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. How did he do it? And how was he found out? Visit our Madoff archive to find out.

Seven months later, the party was really over for the Madoffs and those who had given them their money, trust, and friendship. Some say the Madoff family went down on December 10, when Bernie confessed to the boys. One friend says they probably chose up sides, like players in a baseball game: Bernie, you get Ruthie, and, Mark and Andy, you get each other, and we’ll be the Madoff family once again once the heat dies down. But others, including Mark and Andrew, insist that Ruth chose Bernie at the expense of everything and everyone else. In mid-July, Ruth learned that Bernie might be able to serve his sentence at Otisville, a medium-security prison 70 miles northwest of New York City. “I’m so glad! It’s just what we wanted,” she reportedly told a friend at a pizza parlor, where she had tried to use expired coupons to get a discount. But then word came down that Bernie had been shipped to the Butner Federal Correctional Complex, near Durham, North Carolina.

Days after that, Ruth was believed to be visiting Mark’s first wife, Susan, on Nantucket, and was sighted having her hair done at an RJ Miller salon. She was there under an assumed name.

In her prepared statement, Ruth seemed to be distancing herself from her husband, saying that the life they had shared was over. Many insist that merely one chapter is over and that a new one has begun, and that Ruth will continue to stand by her man. “I had to sell my home because of Bernie,” says one investor, who had considered herself a close friend of Ruth’s. “Quite frankly, I don’t know whether she knew or not—and I don’t know which is worse. Either way, it’s a tragedy for her. He’s ruined a lot of families, but none worse than his own.”

Twice while writing previous stories on the Madoff case for this magazine, I contacted Ruth Madoff’s attorney, Peter Chavkin, for a statement from her, only to be told, essentially, no comment. On May 20, 2009, I sent an overnight letter directly to Ruth Madoff, advising her of the story I was researching about her. “I am hoping to humanize a woman who, I sense, is more than the person portrayed in the media,” I wrote, asking her for a meeting, a phone call, anything. She never responded. On July 9, I again e-mailed Chavkin, who suggested I send a list of questions, which I did at nine a.m. on July 14. I requested a reply by the end of the next business day. Here, unedited, is his answer in full:

Mark, the following is our statement in response; it should be kept intact and portions not picked out of context. This statement is intended as an on-the-record commentonlyin its totality.

The proposed statements sent to us by Vanity Fair for comment are filled with factual falsities and reflect a clear bias. With Vanity Fair imposing essentially a 24 hour turnaround time to respond, we do not intend to rebut each of the over 30 statementsVanity Fairsent. Characteristic of the flat out falsehoods in those statements is Vanity Fair’s allegation that Ruth Madoff abandoned her sons. That is a lie. She loves her sons dearly and because of restrictions on communication with them imposed by the sons’ counsel—restrictions we respected—she was not in contact for several months. She never stopped loving them and it pained her deeply that she could not see them. Similarly false is the notion that Bernie Madoff was not around to help with the family. He took off a good deal of time to be with Ruth, Mark and Andrew throughout their lives. Ruth also never ordered a belly dancer, never envied her sister in law or anyone else, never screamed at a maitre d’ or chef, never screamed at someone at a party for Bernie, and focused on her family, not social status. Moreover, she did not know of or participate in her husband’s wrongdoing and all financial decisions, including Cohmad, the running of all Madoff companies, and investments in vehicles like Madoff Technology were made by Bernie for Ruth without Ruth’s participation. Notable among Vanity Fair’s very few accuracies are the statements that Ruth and a colleague published a cookbook at their expense—which they did to benefit the well respected charity Jewish National Fund—and that she lived with her husband after his arrest when he was confined, by the conditions of his court ordered bail, to the coop that she owned.